Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Welcome To Our New Overlord

by digby

I'm sure you have heard that Snarlin' Arlen has just become the most powerful man in the world. (Ben Nelson must be hurting today.) I'm sure he would have preferred to join the Lieberman for Connecticut Party, but Pennsylvania seems to want a Democrat, se we're stuck with him.

This is not uncommon when there's been a big turnover election. That's how the Democrats finally got rid of Richard Shelby back in 94. If there were more sane Republicans we'd probably see some others. It's a testament to their solidarity with Rush that they are sticking.

If you want to enjoy this watch Fox news. They all look like they've just sucked on a bag of lemons.

Update: Republican leader Limbaugh had this to say today, from Simon at Limbaughwire:

After briefly downplaying the concerns about swine flu, Rush kicked off today's program by noting that Sen. Arlen Specter will announce today his switch from (R-PA) to (D-PA). Rush counseled Specter to take Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and his daughter, Meghan, with him, and then pondered who else in the Senate should make the switch. The only other name he tossed out was Sam Brownback (R-KS). That struck us as... odd, seeing as when Brownback ran for president last year, Republicans "fear[ed] he may be too conservative to win a national election." Brownback's sin, it seems, was voicing support for Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius -- who, according to Rush, is "for every abortion that ever happened" -- as Health and Human Services secretary.

Update II: When asked on CNN about whether or not the Republicans regret taking out the pandemic money in the stimulus, Michael Steele said "we didn't know there was going to be a flu pandemic! You can't make that link!"

He added,

The American people don't want there to be pointing fingers where you don't have people in place or you vogted against the money. What you want to say is "what does the Administration going to do about it now? You cannot, in my view, make this blanket, after the fact, oh gee we should have voted for this money. See, but that had nothing to do with c`reating the jobs six months ago when this whole crisis situation was really kicking off. This bill was supposed to be twoard giving the small business owner who was about t ogo our of business a fighting chance to survive and it has nothing to do with some of the other things that we're now looking at, so I'm not going to sit here and accept that connection. Is the money there? Yeah, the money would have been there whether the congress voted for it six months ago or not because we have an emergency situation and as in all cases, congress will find a way to fund the needs of the people at the time of the crisis situation.

Kira Phillips: Well, I think that's the bottom line Chairman, is that why do voters have to wait until it becomes a crisis. I think voters just want to know whether it's a pandemic, whether it's flooding in New Orleans, whether it's ..

Steele: Absolutely. but it's the priorities, it's the priorities. And at the time the priorities was stabilizing the economy and creating jobs. now the priority is dealing with what is potentially a very serious health issue. The government and elected officials have a responsibility to to step up and help the states work through this thing. So it's a matter of priorities.

And tomorrow, a week from now, three weeks from now, three months from now, the priority might be something different because we don't know what tomorrow holds, we can only deal with the here and now. And that's what we were dealing with when these spending bills were put before the congress and Republicans made a legitimate argument that the trillions of dollars that were being spent had very little to do with job creation and wealth preservation and everything to do with a checklist of spending that Democrats wanted to work their way through.

And one of those items on the check list was preparing for a pandemic. Which we are now possibly facing and which the Republicans didn't think was important enough to spend money on because it wasn't a priority.

They can only live in the here and now. But then we already knew that planning wasn't their strong suit. (See: Iraq occupation)

These Republicans are making the Dems look like disciplined, mature adults by comparison.